ent zigzags where the
footing promised some measure of security. At the bottom he turned short
off to the right and made his way briskly along a rough wagon trail that
hugged the hillside.

"Fresh tracks going in--and then out again," Starr announced musingly
to Rabbit. "Maybe young Calvert hired a load of grub brought out; that,
or he's had a visitor in the last day or two--maybe a week back,
though; this dry ground holds tracks a long while. Go on, it's only a
mile or so now."

The trail took a sudden turn toward the bottom of the wide depression as
though it wearied of dodging rocks and preferred the loose sand below. Of
his own accord Rabbit broke into a steady lope, flinging his head
sidewise now and then to discourage the pestiferous gnats that swarmed
about his ears. Starr, also driven to action of some kind, began to fling
his hands in long sweeping gestures past his face. He hoped that the
cabin, being on a higher bit of ground, would be free from the pests.

Bounding a sharp turn, Starr glimpsed the cabin and frowned as something
unfamiliar in its appearance caught his attention. For just a minute he
could not name the change, and then "Curtains at the windows!" he
snorted. "Now, has the dub gone and got married, wonder?" He hoped not,
and his hope was born not so much from sympathy with any woman who must
live in such a place, but from a very humanly, selfish regard for his own
passing comfort. With a woman in the cabin, Starr would not feel so free
to break his journey there with a rest and a meal or two.

He went on, however, sitting passively in the saddle while Rabbit headed
straight for the spring. The bit of white curtain at the one small,
square window facing that way troubled Starr, though it could not turn
him back thirsty into the desert.

It was Rabbit who, ignorant of the significance of that flapping bit of
white, was taken unawares and ducked sidewise when Helen May, standing
precariously on a rock beside the spring, cupped her hands around her
sun-cracked lips and shouted "Vic!" at the top of her voice. She nearly
fell off the rock when she saw the horse and rider so close. They had
come on her from behind, round another sharp nose of the rock-strewn
hillside, so that she did not see them until they had discovered her.

"Oh!" said Helen May quite flatly, dropping her hands from her sunburned
face and looking Starr over with the self-possessed, inquiring eyes of
one who is accustomed to ga